When Charles Darwin was writing The Origin of Species, what he had in mind primarily was the evolution of animal species, and the immensely long timeline of trial-and-error natural selection that had gone into the making of the world he had around him. Darwin's concept of evolution was a remarkable insight, a revelation of the unbroken road that connects every living thing, back into the darkest recesses of prehistory.  It turns out that everything Darwin hypothesized about insects and plants, birds and humans, is also true about viruses. Viruses evolve, too - just a lot faster. If it takes thousands of generations and millions of years for humans to evolve from apes, a virus, it turns out, can evolve into a new form in a matter of weeks.  If the slow churn of the millennia has allowed us as humans to adapt at a similar pace to everything else, the evolution of viruses hasn't allowed us any such luxury - we're now forced to adapt socially at a far faster pace. Rethinking how we relate to each other, and what's necessary for our mutual survival, has to be our primary objective, local politics and nationalism aside.  Viruses have that evolutionary function: paying no attention to borders, nations, genders or skin colour, they create new forms of social behaviour, reminding us that we are one people, forcing us to work together. As writer Laura Spinner puts it "infectious diseases have shaped social evolution no less powerfully than have wars, revolutions and economic crises." Original air date: March 16, 2020

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